The Shrine

I'm surprised!

Let me break it down.

New battleground that plays like Payload from TF2.
New battleground that play like DoTA\LoL.
New class that plays like Street Fighter (no auto attack).
Pet Battles, Trainable, Tradeable, Catchable (Pokemon).
Anyone that agrees to the WoW Annual Pass gets Diablo III for free.

So basically, they jumped into my brain, took all of the games I love and smashed them into the next expansion. There's lots more, but this is the good stuff (imo).

The annual pass is one of the more ridiculous offers I've seen for a MMORPG. Usually one year sub is offered somewhere around $100 since committing one year in advance is a lot. If you go $15X12 = $180, the difference is more than enough to pay for Diablo 3, not to mention $80 cash is better than an $80 game in case you change your mind. Even if you're already on a long term plan, I'd argue for a lot of people rahter have a saving of say $20-40 (depending on exact price for 3/6/12 month plans) is more useful than a copy of Diablo 3, even if you plan on getting Diablo 3 eventually. Also, yearly plans are usually recurring, so if you are supposed to be playing the game for a while, saving $40 an year is $80 in two years and so on.

Buying Diablo 3 for 4 months of WoW looks like an okay deal, though if Diablo 3 doesn't totally suck you probably won't be playing WoW much during those 4 months. I assume you don't have to activate it immediately, but if you play Diablo 3 for a couple of months that's also when all the major MMORPGs are coming out (SWTOR, GW2, etc).

The Annual Pass doesn't have to be paid for at $15\month...if you change your payment plan to the 6-month or yearly ones that are offered, the price goes down significantly, and you still keep a free copy of Diablo III. If you were planning on continuing to play anyway (probably the majority of people who care), this is great.

I pretty much only do dailies in WoW and that's about it. I go on the occasional achievement hunt, but it definitely isn't enough time to cut into Diablo III. As far as the other MMOs go, SWTOR at least will be out a few months before Diablo III, which will probably be out a few months before the expansion...I bet time won't be that much of an issue.

The yearly or longer subs are never meant for people who are going to play anyway. It's meant to entice the guys who otherwise pay monthly to stick around longer instead of quitting, and it's a pure loss on anyone who was going to play that long anyway. I don't even see the price of the annual plan listed so I guess their goal is hoping people will be stupid and pay for it monthly.

I checked the price for WoW now and 6 months plan is base $13/month, so that's $156/year. There's no price listed for 1 year, but usually you've to give a nice and round number so $120 would be the lowest it could be ($10X12) that looks enticing, so you save $36/year assuming it's recurring. Usually you have to go to $100 since human beings are attracted to numbers with a lot of 0s in front of them, which is a pretty steep discount even from the 6 month.

For an yearly sub, you're not getting much value unless you absolutely would have bought the collector's edition for D3, or you really value beta invites. I think they should've offered a beta invite for Diablo 3, not the WoW expansion, because WoW isn't really the coolest game on the block anyway. But people sure seem to be willing to do a lot to get a D3 beta.

If commit to the annual plan, you basically can keep paying every month, 3 months, or 6 months.

Also D3's beta is short and pretty boring heh.

I'm not talking about the D3 beta that has like the first 3 waypoints equivalent of Act 1. They should just offer you a beta into the whole thing. That'll surely generate a lot of interest since people want to play the latest and coolest game before anyone else did. If you played Mists of Pandaria before anyone else did people will probably just say, "LOL Pandas" but if you played Diablo 3 before anyone else did, that makes you cool, or at least cooler than someone who beta tested for Pandaria. Beta testing for WoW right now might as well be beta testing for Madden 2013. It might still be a juggernaut but nobody is going to think they're really cool for seeing the next iteration of the same old stuff.

With significant competition coming out, including Diablo 3 itself since the audience is covers has a significant overlap with WoW itself, you got to give people a good idea for them to commit for another year. I guess Blizzard is trying to do this without giving up cash but there's a reason why most deals are done by offering cash. To quote Balthier, "I prefer treasures whose value can be measured." Most people prefer to have a saving that can be measured in dollars.

Well, I know I'll be playing WoW for the next year, and I know that when MoP beta time comes around, I'll be dying to get into it, so this is great for me.

Not to look cool though, that's not really why I like betas.

Don't worry Alec, cool is relative



and I am obviously the absolute zero of this forum.

Don wrote:I'm not talking about the D3 beta that has like the first 3 waypoints equivalent of Act 1. They should just offer you a beta into the whole thing. That'll surely generate a lot of interest since people want to play the latest and coolest game before anyone else did. If you played Mists of Pandaria before anyone else did people will probably just say, "LOL Pandas" but if you played Diablo 3 before anyone else did, that makes you cool, or at least cooler than someone who beta tested for Pandaria. Beta testing for WoW right now might as well be beta testing for Madden 2013. It might still be a juggernaut but nobody is going to think they're really cool for seeing the next iteration of the same old stuff.

With significant competition coming out, including Diablo 3 itself since the audience is covers has a significant overlap with WoW itself, you got to give people a good idea for them to commit for another year. I guess Blizzard is trying to do this without giving up cash but there's a reason why most deals are done by offering cash. To quote Balthier, "I prefer treasures whose value can be measured." Most people prefer to have a saving that can be measured in dollars.

Diablo isn't the kinda game where you can offer that much content in beta, if somebody could beat the whole game in beta, even without the higher/harder difficulties there's a great chance they won't bother to buy the full thing since they've seen the story.

But they're already giving up Diablo 3 for free for a 12 month commitment, so there's no loss there.

Alec wrote:Well, I know I'll be playing WoW for the next year, and I know that when MoP beta time comes around, I'll be dying to get into it, so this is great for me.

Not to look cool though, that's not really why I like betas.

Obviously people have different things they value, but I'd think a Diablo 3 beta (the full game) would be viewed as more valuable than MoP, since most people aren't expecting MoP to deviate from the norm, while Diablo 3 is still closely under wraps.

There's a difference between offering WoW players D3, and forcing people to buy a year of WoW for access to D3.

People are quite willing to pay a lot for early access to stuff, so you might as well take advantage of it. If Blizzard offered beta for D3 + MoP, is that somehow worse than just offering beta access to MoP? Sure people will cry about it, but I am sure far more people will buy another year of WoW if it means they get to play Diablo 3 earlier even in some incomplete form.

Now there's always the possibility that Diablo 3 isn't ready to be played by a ton of people so they don't want news to get out about how it's not ready, though Blizzard has a loose NDA structure so if D3 totally sucks, people would most likely knew ahead of time anyway.

What you're talking about will lose them a lot of the good will they've been building up over the years. Offering incentives to people paying more past material goods/game time is a real class war move in an industry where paying real life money to be better than someone else in a game translates to a lot of frowny faced people. Not looking to get into a discussion of that being how the real world works. What it will do is lose them good will and potentially a great deal of their customer base. They've already made that real money pet that can be traded in game. While it's useless, another move on the heels of the direction of being opportunistic fucktards would piss a lot of people off.

As for Pandaria... making canon an April fools joke, while in line with Blizzard's tongue in cheek humor, is something that makes me think they're not taking this game as seriously as they could be. What's coming sounds interesting, but it's not going to be getting me to shell out what will be well over $100 for expansions that I'm behind on in order to reactivate my account and have access to content.

Microtransactions are here to stay. RIFT most likely sold a lot of preorders copies by offering guaranteed beta access (which you can even cancel). Unless there's a reason to believe people without money will actually quitting the game because some guy with money gets something he doesn't have (in another game even) it'll just be your usual whiny doomsday talk. I'd argue that microtransactions are doing it completely wrong by NOT offering the guy with money a considerable benefit. People just aren't going to be buying your virtual unicorns over and over if there isn't some kind of advantage.

The only legitmate concern I can see is if they somehow sold like 100K annual passes, that's an awful a lot of people to support a beta test for a game that they probably don't intend to have that many people playing. However BNet's been around for a very long time so I assume Blizzard knows how to handle stuff like that.

It's worth mentioning that Pandaren have been canon since the WC3 expansion. Yes, they did start as an April Fool's joke, but this race has been one of the most requested things in WoW for it's entire run. I don't think they're including them because "Herp Derp, Pandas!" It's because it's what the fans want (most of them, anyway).

The Kung Fu Panda movies are the reason people think it's a joke expo heh. -_-

I think it'd be difficult to sell an expansion featuring pandas in China too.

I guess it used to be? There are now already other mmos in China that use pandas in such ways.